The creator of an iconic anti-Obama image is no angry conservative frustrated at corporate bailouts and healthcare reform, but a student from the president's hometown who favoured an even more liberal presidential candidate.

The work depicting Barack Obama as Batman's archenemy the Joker, which appeared on street posters, T-shirts and bumper stickers across the country this summer, was fashioned on a lark by a bored Palestinian-American on break from university.

Firas Alkhateeb, 20, is far from one of the red-faced protesters who have shouted down Democratic politicians at constituent meetings, nor is he a smug young conservative standing against his Obama-enthralled peers.

Alkhateeb told the Los Angeles Times that he did not vote in November, but had he, he would have cast a ballot for Dennis Kucinich, one of the most liberal politicians in America. He made the image of Obama in black, white, green and red face paint this winter from a cover portrait of an October issue of Time magazine, following a tutorial on how to "Jokerise" images.

Alkhateeb said he intended no political statement. But a still anonymous Obama critic downloaded his image, removed the magazine cover banner, appended the caption "socialism", then hung posters across Los Angeles this summer.

At least since last year, critics have lobbed the long-dormant socialist charge against Obama, and the Obama-as-Joker motif was immediately adopted by conservatives of a certain stripe who neglected the fact that the Joker of the Batman tales was no Marxist-Leninist. (To the extent the hip comic villain portrayed by Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson and finally Heath Ledger could be said to hold any political ideology, he was an anarchist.)

Americans debated whether the reference, with its connotation of urban chaos and crime, was racist. Critics from Los Angeles to Washington panned the street art as facile and obvious.

"The great virtue of an anonymous poster campaign is that it anticipates unspoken fears or claims, and leads the debate by insinuating and teasing out ideas that would be too explosive or alienating if simply dumped into the public forum by responsible actors," Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott wrote. "The Obama Joker poster leaves you with the sense that it has said everything it has to say, and waits only for the media to endorse the message."

Alkhateeb, meanwhile, has a different criticism of the president.

"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," he told the Los Angeles Times. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him."